We’re all feeling the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic and when times are tough, it’s easy to cut straight for the marketing budget. But with online sales soaring by 40-50% as a result of the pandemic, there are opportunities online and strategies like SEO are now more important than ever. Now is when you should be analysing what you’re doing and identifying ways to diversify to best compete in the challenging ‘new normal’ and specifically, online.
So if you’re trying to put your business case together for why SEO investment is important, here are the top 10 SEO objections and why they’re nothing but a load of old lorem ipsum.
There are lots of free tools, e-books and plugins for SEO, but is that enough?
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1. “We can do SEO ourselves”
There are so many free tools, online tutorials, e-books and articles promising to help you skyrocket your rankings quickly and easily. But it’s important to bear in mind that most of these sites offering the free information only give you some of the picture as a lead magnet for their own SEO services.
Even clever plugins like Yoast that highlight and advise on how to improve the SEO score of your content, only look at the on-page factors.
You might be able to tweak your content to score a green light, but are you targeting the right keyphrase in the first place? Does your website have fundamental issues that restrict ranking like slow load time, complex coding or usability factors?
And it’s important to remember that if SEO isn’t applied correctly, it can even damage your online presence, so you need a trusted expert.
Comprehensive SEO that really gets results, analyses your whole offering – your website, your products/services, your competitors, your target market, your target keyphrases, etc. etc.
SEO is a multifaceted strategy that looks at a wide range of on-page and off-page ranking factors to create a unique, dynamic strategy. There’s no one size fits all, no one ring to rule them all. Each business needs a bespoke strategy based on thorough keyphrase and market research, tackling search rankings from multiple angles. And even once your SEO campaign is up and running, it needs to be monitored, reviewed and tweaked to ensure success over the long term.
2. “We’ve tried SEO before and it doesn’t work”
This one usually goes hand in hand with “we can do it ourselves”. Because of the availability of free tools and compelling marketing, lots of people dabble in their own SEO with limited success, and then write it off straight away. When done properly though, SEO can have impressive results.
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There are also lots of cowboys out there that approach businesses promising backlinks and number 1 rankings. But you need to be careful who you work with. The internet is full of spammers and scammers so you should do your research and only work with partners who have a solid online profile, proven results and 5-star reviews.
3. “We don’t need SEO”
Some websites are lucky and rank well with little SEO input. Maybe they have a strong physical presence on the high street, a cult following on social media, publicity in the press and/or a truly unique offering with limited competition. If this is your company, congratulations! You’ve done a great job so far. But imagine what you could do with a little SEO? With an SEO strategy you could rank even better, drive even more traffic and uncover hidden opportunities.
What’s more, although you’re ranking well today, the online marketplace is always evolving with more and more people entering every day, so maintaining your top spot in the long run can be tricky – and this is when SEO can help. As competitors enter the market or you look for new growth opportunities, SEO will give you a competitive edge which can sustain your online success and prosperity over the long term.
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4. “We don’t have time”
Don’t worry, outsourcing SEO to a specialist is surprisingly affordable and you’ll get better results. Check out our SEO packages.
5. “Paid ads get better results”
If you’re looking for quick wins, paid adverts can get good results. But as soon as your ad stops, your presence in the SERP will disappear. And usually, if your company is investing in adverts, it isn’t investing in SEO, so of course, paid ads would appear to get better results.
SEO establishes a strong presence in the SERP and reaps results over the long term. In fact, studies suggest that SEO provides a better return on investment than paid ads overall – but more on that later. SEO can reduce the cost of your ads too.
6. “SEO takes a while to get results”
And the long-term nature of SEO can drive the above objection, particularly if you’ve worked with paid ads in the past. While it’s true SEO might not deliver results overnight, it does pave the way to long-term sustained growth and success through establishing a strong presence in the SERP and building brand authority.
7. “Search results have too many adverts”
That depends on which keyphrases you’re targeting. If you’re going after transactional intent phrases like ‘Air Force 1 Size 7’ when people are ready to buy, there will be lots of ads trying to catch the click.
But there are as many as 3.5 billion searches on Google every day and many people research before they buy. So if you target phrases with informational or commercial/investigating intent e.g. ‘2020 shoe trends’, you’ll probably see fewer ads and have a better chance of competing.
Also savvy users know advertisers have paid for their spot, so many simply skip over adverts. Organic listings have earned their spot and this, in turn, earns the trust of conscientious users.
SEO also goes further than paid ads by covering YouTube ranking and what happens when people land on your website.
8. “SEO doesn’t get the right kind of traffic”
This is often because your SEO targeting doesn’t match your user intentions. Plus your landing pages may not be delivering the right message or signals.
And like we said above, SEO might not always bring in people that are ready to buy right now, but it does bring in sales leads that have the potential to buy in future. People window shop on the high street all the time and the internet is full of browsers and researchers. SEO is a relatively low-cost way to advertise your business, attract attention, build your brand, grow an audience and drive traffic to your website. So SEO plays a critical role in helping online sales.
9. “It’s hard to calculate SEO ROI”
Google Analytics has lots of tools and reports that can help you calculate ROI. It just depends on what you want to class as a ‘return’. If you have an e-commerce website you can base return on actual sales, and on other sites, you may want to consider things like increased traffic or contact form completions, and then attribute a value to these.
We often calculate the ROI of our SEO campaigns by looking at the increase in sales over the period of the campaign compared with the total cost including marketing, website build, maintenance and even hosting. For example, our work with a well-known artist’s website saw an ROI of over 1,800% based on actual sales increases. And more recently, we built and optimised a website for a British tea grower which saw an astounding 86% increase in sales within the first 3 months of launch. This equated to a 155% ROI – not bad at all!
Once you’ve decided how you’re going to calculate ROI is relatively simple to do and track.
And it’s worth noting that many marketers actually consider SEO to have one of the highest ROIs out of the digital marketing channels. According to a Search Engine Journal Survey, almost 50% of people said that organic search had the highest ROI when compared to paid search, email and social media marketing for example.
10. “SEO is too complicated”
True! SEO is complex with 100s of factors of small wins all working together to make a big win. But that’s what the SEO specialists are for. At Solve we keep up to date with all the latest trends and best practices so you don’t have too. We love geeky SEO stuff – all you need to worry about are the results.
Convinced?
So there you have it – the top 10 objections refuted! If you fancy some further reading on why investing in SEO is money well spent, check out our 7 reasons why you should invest in SEO post.
And if you want to talk to the legendary SEO specialists that get the results we mentioned in this article – get in touch today.
